tending to depart from the main point or cover a wide range of subjects

Saturday, 7 February 2015

Using Gentoo to create a cross toolchain for the old NSLU2 systems (armv5te)

This is mostly written so I don't forget how to create a custom (Arm) toolchain the Gentoo way (in a Gentoo chroot).

I have been a Debian user since 2001, and I like it a lot. Yet I have had my share of problems with it, mostly because due to lack of time I have very little disposition to try to track unstable or testing, so I am forced to use stable.

This led me to be a fan of Russ Albery's backport script and to create a lot of local backports of packages that are already in unstable or testing.

But this does not help when packages are simply missing from Debian or when something like creating an arm uclibc based system that should be kept up to date, from a security PoV.

I have experience with Buildroot and I must say I like it a lot for creating custom root filesystems and even toolchains. It allows a lot of flexibility that binary distros like Debian don't offer, it does its designated work, creating root filesystems. But buildroot is not appropriate for a system that should be kept up to date, because it lacks a mechanism by which to be able to update to new versions of packages without recompiling the entire rootfs.

So I was hearing from the guys from the Linux Action Show (and Linux Unplugged - by the way, Jupiter Broadcast, why do I need scripts enabled from several sites just to see the links for the shows?) how Arch is great and all, that is a binary rolling release, and that you can customize packages by building your own packages from source using makepkg. I tried it, but Arm support is provided for some specific (modern) devices, my venerable Linksys NSLU2's (I have 2 of them) not being among them.

So I tried Arch in a chroot, then dropped it in favour of a Gentoo chroot since I was under the feeling running Arch from a chroot wasn't such a great idea and I don't want to install Arch on my SSD.

I used succesfully Gentoo in the past to create an arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi chroot back in 2008 and I always liked the idea of USE flags from Gentoo, so I knew I could do this.